It’s strange how I cannot remember your voice, but if I heard it, I would immediately know it was you. Clint Smith

Everyone is going to die, including the people you love most.
But no one tells you that, especially when you’re young.

You find out the hard way, when one of your essential hearts stops beating.
And no amount of pounding from your own can recharge it.

When my son left the world, his heart was the last organ to fail.
It kept trying to jump start his life, protesting in vain that he was too young to go.

The pain in mine was so intense, I thought it might stop, too,
as if to say, why bother beating now?

The initial separation was bleak and complete,
a void I could not cross, a light switch I could not find.

But even in my darkest moments, I was never alone,
bound as we are by the universal energy that never dies.

In time, I found a way to build a life around the hole,
a path to stay, ways to keep my son close.

But our departed are never lost or fully out of reach.
They’ve just in a place we cannot see.

Can the months and miles really separate you from someone you love,
when to say “I remember …” is to conjure them here?

As I relive the past, I feel my boy revive and take his place nearby.
Impossible to hold, forever outside of my touch, his love burns on.

I will never love him less, and I cannot be consoled.
But I would not trade this broken place if it meant never having him at all.

We can still love the world, even when it shatters our hearts.
The memories live on, the stardust we are made of continuing to connect us all.